31 ms·

As head of IT for a company using Slack: FINALLY. Don't get me wrong--it's not like I want to read your messages and very likely won't. But there are times whe

• fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Why can't the recipient save a copy of logs?
  • sliken 9y ago
    Because they typically can be easily falsified.
    • antris 9y ago
      You could have the logs signed with Slack's PGP key so they cannot be altered without the signature causing a mismatch.
      • IncRnd 9y ago
        There are security issues here that you may not be aware. For one example, if technically knowledgeable people want to falsify signed logs without having the signing key, they can simply keep a separate set of logs with actual innocuous conversations. Slack would sign those in your scenario without a problem. This is the canonical problem of keeping "double-books".
        • dsacco 9y ago
          While I agree with auditable access to employee DMs, there is a middle ground solution that trivially solves the problem you've presented. Instead of providing the employer with access to the employee's messages directly, logs can be signed at both the blob and message level. Then if an employee selectively turns over only some of their logs, the mismatch will be readily apparent.
          • dlubarov 9y ago
            Not sure what you mean by blobs? If Slack implemented a scheme like this, they should sign a message which includes metadata like the org name, channel name and timestamps in addition to text.
            • dsacco 9y ago
              By blob I mean an archive dump of every message and the metadata you're describing. If that dump is hashed, selectively presenting messages in the dump is obvious.
          • IncRnd 9y ago
            Of course it can be solved! I was pointing out that the prior comment was incorrect. If an employee is in possession of chat logs that if divulged will get them fired, they can simply delete the logs. "Sorry, the drive crashed. IT is working to fix it right now." Stepwise refinement to insecurely re-create security solutions is one of the reasons for many security vulnerabilities. Logs are well understood, and logging of sensitive information is not just a small technical issue but a security issue. The same way that people shouldn't design their own crypto, when people design logging mechanisms for sensitive data, which is seemingly simple, they will almost always introduce these security errors, as in your post. Unfortunately, there are also a number of legal issues (and possibly compliance issues) that need to be accounted for from redaction to anonymity and from GDPR to encryption.
      • simias 9y ago
        Arguably, but what if the company wants to find proof of, say, two employees colluding to exfiltrate sensitive data or something like that? Would they have to convince them to turn in the PGP signed logs? More generally like the parent I don't see why a company couldn't have full control over their corporate tools.
        • pera 9y ago
          > two employees colluding to exfiltrate sensitive data or something like that In that case spying Slack usage is simply not enough: the employer should need to spy every single move every employee makes inside and outside the company, which of course it's not possible (well, except if the company is located in a fascist state).
          • stale2002 9y ago
            Not everybody is going to send one time pad private key encrypted messages using a 1000 characater password. It turns out that having access to slack alone would probably catch 95% of situations.
        • mistercow 9y ago
          What if those two employees collude to do something like that via their own private phones? Should employers have access to those too? It doesn't seem to me like any of this really does anything, since there are (and should be) plenty of ways that employees can communicate without their employer having access.
  • IncRnd 9y ago
    You need non-repudiation of changes to log contents.
  • jerf 9y ago
    Provenance. I can doctor my local logs just about as quickly as I can type. True, it's a bit harder than some people estimate to keep the whole thing coherent, but that just means that you hear about the people who get caught, but not the ones who do it successfully. If I am capable of doctoring Slack's copy of the logs with sufficient effort, it is certainly orders of magnitude harder and much legally riskier (as I would be committing many felonies in the process).
    • darawk 9y ago
      That's easy to disprove, though. Make them log into their slack on a new computer, and they'll have no opportunity to doctor them.
      • stedaniels 9y ago
        It's got enterprise auth, they could just as easily login to the Slack account themselves. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      • jerf 9y ago
        The parent I was replying to said they ought to keep the Slack logs themselves. If they're logging into Slack to get them, then it is Slack doing the keeping and we're back to Slack doing the storage.
  • dsacco 9y ago
    What is the material difference between having employees save DM logs in an auditable, authenticated way and being able to view employee DMs? If any employee can ostensibly be compelled to provide their logs when asked by their employer, you are getting just as much information as if IT can view them directly. The only way IT doesn't get as much information is if the system doesn't work, for example because employees can alter their logs or simply refuse to provide them. In that scenario having employees saving their own logs gives you more privacy, but doesn't solve the essential problem. The tradeoff here is convenience of access versus friction. When you are reviewing an auditable log of information related to an employee, you don't necessarily want to have to ask the employee for that information, nor do you necessarily want them to know you're reviewing it.
    • afastow 9y ago
      > What is the material difference between having employees save DM logs in an auditable, authenticated way and being able to view employee DMs? > When you are reviewing an auditable log of information related to an employee, you don't necessarily want to have to ask the employee for that information, nor do you necessarily want them to know you're reviewing it. You just answered your own question. You might not want them to know you're reviewing it but they most certainly do want to know that you are.
      • dsacco 9y ago
        > You might not want them to know you're reviewing it but they most certainly do want to know that you are. Of course they want to know. Everyone wants to know. But if they committed a crime, or at least are complicit in a lawsuit the company is facing, their desire for privacy on an information channel they don't own is irrelevant. I don't understand why this is controversial. When the SEC, FBI, local police, opposing legal team, etc. want you to hand over information about an employee, having to ask the employee directly or even let them know is problematic.
        • afastow 9y ago
          Maybe I missed some context but since when are we talking about committing crimes and the SEC or FBI getting involved? If it's that serious I assume they'd just get a warrant and get the logs directly from Slack. To me that scenario is completely unrelated to the ability of an employer to silently read DMs of their employees for any reason they see fit.
• ramblerman 9y ago
  > Only way to see it was to boot an offending intern from his work station and go into his Slack to see what was happening. Why couldn't you just ask the recipient to look on his station? > We had to make all intern accounts into multi-channel guests after that Are 2 interns ever allowed to be alone together? I mean it's essentially the same, you are saying they can't be trusted so either you always need them in groups of 3, or you should put cameras everywhere with microphones... I am glad that you are serious about tackling abuse, but more monitoring and rules about congregation are not the right solution imo.
  • softawre 9y ago
    Not to be contrarian here, but could you offer a solution given that you've thought about this?
    • mixmastamyk 9y ago
      Did you miss his first (the second) paragraph?
      • Kalium 9y ago
        I don't know about parent, but I did notice that! I saw it clearly written there. I read it and understood it. I understand that the person who wrote it believes it is sufficient to cover all relevant needs. I would posit that this person may not be familiar with the importance of collecting evidence against possible future needs. An IT manager's testimony from memory, no matter how perfect, is not as useful as evidence collected in a technological manner at the time of offense. With that in mind, walking over and looking at the intern's screen might be considered by some to be less than a full replacement.
        • mixmastamyk 9y ago
          No need to recite from memory when the log is trivially viewed or copied at a later date.
• random4369 9y ago
  There's an infinite space of solutions to your particular problem, but your chosen solution is totalitarian surveillance in the workplace because an intern got offended? I avoid workplaces which force shit like this. So do all the good developers I know, because they're people who can afford to be choosy. Bullies are pretty adept at functioning in these environments. Instead of harassing on monitored DMs, they'll make verbal comments with double meanings, use their leverage to put their targets in unpleasant situations, undercut their targets at meetings etc. Totalitarian surveillance doesn't stop bullies. It just makes your workplace a soul-destroying shithole for the employees who are forced to work in it.
  • personjerry 9y ago
    Would you provide a small list of solutions as examples?
    • mabermoske 9y ago
      How about ask the intern being bullied to show the bullying messages?
      • matthewcford 9y ago
        And the sender deletes the message?
  • bruhbruhbruh 9y ago
    Infinite space of solutions? I think not. If the harassment was in any way sexual, the company had a legal responsibility to investigate. It may have been a timely matter and the best and/or only solution was to read the messages at the offending intern's workstation.
  • mfringel 9y ago
    No, he chose it because a group of interns was harassing other interns. Words matter.
  • chrischen 9y ago
• s3nnyy 9y ago
  > "Compare that to our email, where I can go into anyone's messages immediately if need-be. This is all very standard corporate IT stuff that you need for HR and legal reasons." Wow, THAT is highly illegal in Europe.
  • irishsultan 9y ago
    Given his username he may well be from europe.
  • tikkabhuna 9y ago
    In the UK they're allowed to monitor work email[0]. I'm not sure how that compares to the rest of Europe. In financial services they monitor all kind of chat rooms, especially after the LIBOR scandal. Every chat I open gives me a disclaimer saying that chats will be monitored. [0] https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/work/rights-at-work/basic-rights-and-contracts/monitoring-at-work/ https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/work/rights-at-work/basic-...
  • stedaniels 9y ago
    Please state the relevant law that it'd be breaking, I'm genuinely curious. Compliance tools are built into most cloud and enterprise offerings that allow this. Do you not have experience of enterprise/cloud email offerings?
    • s3nnyy 9y ago
      At least in Switzerland and Germany, I thought they can record, and, in case of legal case, also read your emails provided that it is expected to give strong supporting material for the case.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • Tyrannosaur 9y ago
    Really? I like to consider myself much more privacy-minded than most, but I would expect an email assigned to an employee to be used for official business purposes should definitely have a paper trail that higher-ups can audit if necessary.
• SomeHacker44 9y ago
  LOL. I was about to write a post with this exact first line. Thank you for beating me to it.
• k__ 9y ago
  You should be fired for that comment alone.
  • bpicolo 9y ago
    Every big enterprise on the planet has your email to whip-out and read if legal issues arise, whether that's for internal reasons or for something like SOX compliance or running into problems with the SEC. It's a total necessity for big public companies.
    • k__ 9y ago
      Guess that's what's wrong with such entities...
• yiiii 9y ago
  As I do not know which country you are from I really hope you checked before if what you did complies with the legislation as for example in many european countries this would be very illegal.
• brazzledazzle 9y ago
  I wish a compromise between willy-nilly dumps of private DMs and their Compliance Exports could have been found. As a user who is not the head of IT this is frustrating. Now frank discussions have to go back to out-of-band channels. If anyone thinks this won't get abused, think again. I've worked with IT folks of all shapes and sizes over many years and a tiny percentage do abuse the privilege. Including heads of IT. And those are just the ones I know about.
  • tvanantwerp 9y ago
    I'll agree that a whole dump of data is not the ideal solution to the problem here.
  • dcow 9y ago
    Unfortunately the US is a surveillance state.
  • Cacti 9y ago
    I mean, how do you think your email is handled? Your internet traffic? This stuff has been monitored and recorded by companies for decades, why would Slack be any different?
• peterkelly 9y ago
  If two people want to have a private conversation, they'll just find another means by which to do it. In the long run, abusing your privileged access to conversations intended to be private (however justified you may consider it to be) will just breed mistrust among employees. I would quit a job that treated me as a child which must be supervised in such a manner.
  • Spooky23 9y ago
    You had better work for yourself then. EDiscovery is a thing, and employee preference will never trump a judge’s order.
  • JshWright 9y ago
    >I would quit a job that treated me as a child which must be supervised in such a manner. Are you replying to the right comment? From the example given, it seems no action was taken until the parties involved proved such supervision was necessary.
  • protomyth 9y ago
    > abusing your privileged access to conversations intended to be private (however justified you may consider it to be) will just breed mistrust among employees Abusing your privileged access?!? You do realize some of us are required to access those communications for a variety of reasons especially because a threat is happening? Also, I don't get a choice when the lawyer shows up and says we need to look at X's account. > I would quit a job that treated me as a child which must be supervised in such a manner. Well, that might save me a bit of trouble, but at the point I am asked to look at your account, I get the feeling you are on your way out anyway or will shortly have a lawyer or the police contacting you. The communication systems you use as an employee are not yours.
    • netcraft 9y ago
      > because a threat is happening because an "alleged" threat is happening. Still, cause for gathering evidence, sure. > I don't get a choice when the lawyer shows up and says we need to look at X's account And now with this, they'll use a different communication method that you dont have access to and now youre back to square one. The best you can hope for is that theyre ignorant of these changes so you can catch them. > ... at the point I am asked to look at your account, I get the feeling you are on your way out anyway or will shortly have a lawyer or the police contacting you. ah, guilty until proven innocent > The communication systems you use as an employee are not yours. This is true, and I dont think slack is necessarily wrong in providing this access - but you shouldnt assume that communications that the user doesnt want the company to be privy to is necessarily malicious or illegal. If you are having legitimate complaints about your job and you want to vent or validate your concerns before proceeding, you might want to have a private conversation with a coworker - and you might legitimately be afraid that your unfiltered, undiplomatic private conversation might be taken out of context or retaliated against.
• petermcneeley 9y ago
  So long as they can go through your chat history it seems very reasonable and is not simply a further entrenchment of the structure of power. Information is power: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tvanantwerp https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tvanantwerp
  • tvanantwerp 9y ago
    Uh, ok? Never really posted on HN under the illusion it was private, so not sure what you're going for here...
    • petermcneeley 9y ago
      I apologize if this seemed personal. I just think that information asymmetry is a type of power differential. HN does not have such a n asymmetry when it comes to chat history.
• flurdy 9y ago
  > This is all very standard corporate IT stuff that you need for HR and legal reasons. I doubt that, but it is country dependant. In some of the countries I have worked in it is quite the opposite. You get drilled for legal purposes you are not to look at people's personal emails and if possible DMs. Mostly as it is potentially illegal. I have not worked in the US though. I was however unaware that in Norway then can access your email in exceptional circumstances: https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/privacy-and-society/personvern-pa-arbeidsplassen/employers-access-to-e-mails-and-private-files/ https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/privacy-and-society/personver... It seems in case of gross breach of duty, the employee has to be notified, then they can access their work email.
• fogzen 9y ago
  So employees can read your private slack right? F it’s really just about creating a safe space, I don’t see why management is exempt.
  • praneshp 9y ago
    Typically management is not exempt. If management == admin, then there'll be a user mode in which management uses the app normally, and an admin mode where you do admin-y stuff.
• xori 9y ago
  Totally agree. If harassment is a problem they'll find other ways, but that doesn't mean an employer has to provide an outlet for them to harass on.
• arez 9y ago
  It's called "private" for a reason. If someone harasses me on Slack, I have proof of that, because they wrote me a message. If people have private conversations about anything, it should be of no one's concern. Same goes for Signal or Whatsapp, it's a private conversation. It's like putting microphones everywhere and then fire people who have a bad day and say something stupid once in a while, would you like that? This is not a world I wanna live in and it's a serious move against privacy and freedom of speech.
  • zenhack 9y ago
    Yeah, and there's a reason some places have laws against bugging offices. One key thing is that everyone should be clear on what's recorded and what's not, and "if it's written down" at least has the virtue of relative simplicity. Probably if it's not supposed to be fair game for later investigation it shouldn't be logged at all. I think part of the trouble is that we spend too much time at work for most people to actually be productive the whole time -- if you buy the notion that it's reasonable for people to be at work to work, and they shouldn't be socializing whathaveyou, then logging everything seems more reasonable than if you recognize that no one can actually be a drone 40/hr a week, then the surveillance starts to look like de facto surveillance of stuff other than the job, which is more worrying. I am in the privileged position of doing freelance work, on my own machine, mostly remote. As such, if I'm using a client's communication systems it is essentially guaranteed to be work related, so having it logged doesn't bother me; if I'm not working I'm using something else. But being monitored for half your waking hours five days a week feels much more onerous. I suspect some of a this is tension with reasonable expectations of levels of monitoring from when less of our communication was via the network.
• asow92 9y ago
  Maybe you should start at the root of the issue and vet your interns before bringing them on.
• DoreenMichele 9y ago
  With the recent Facebook news, I should have thought that sort of concern was obvious. It's always going to be Eternal September somewhere on the internet.
• lostlogin 9y ago
  > Only way to see it was to boot an offending intern from his work station and go into his Slack to see what was happening. Couldn’t the complainant show their history or screenshots? Going through peoples messages is a bit yuck, even if they are horrible individuals.
• luk32 9y ago
  If they harassed them in toilet would you install cameras there? =P Sorry, but that's the same kind of argument for invading someone's privacy and justifying surveillance. I doubt that anyone would agree even if you said you'll watch the videos only when necessary.
• I_am_tiberius 9y ago
  Instant messaging is used to express instant thoughts. Instant thoughts can be used against you if accessible by the employer. So why using instant messages over email if you anyway need to think through your instant messages in Slack like you do with emails? Let's use emails then. I think most people will only learn the importance of privacy after having been affected personally.
• dalbasal 9y ago
  One might argue that this is exactly the reason why slack should not have made this decision. Inevitably, some communications channels are audit-able and some are not. Modern employees (being modern people) use a lot of channels. They call eachother, SMS, Whatsapp, Slack, email ...sometimes people even talk. Companies have only partial control. Anyway, harassment or other misbehavior can happen on any of these. In some cases (like your intern case) companies have to audit, if they can. Can Audit = Must Audit If slack gives employers the option to read messages, they've given employers the responsibility to do it. It's not cut and dry. You could argue that companies won't/can't use slack unless they can read messages. This is doubtless true in some cases and I imagine slack has it's eye on these cases right now. But, I think it's hard-ish to argue the magnitude is all that big today. Companies did use slack before this feature existed, including yours.
• wrs 9y ago
  You didn't have compliance exports turned on already?
• clairity 9y ago
  > "This is all very standard corporate IT stuff that you need for HR and legal reasons." there's the problem right there. (1) need =/= want. you want those things to cover your butt. you're not entitled to them. do you really want to live in a surveillance/nanny state? (2) the legal system can't save every person from negative consequences, nor can it truly compensate for negative consequences without other negative actions. stuff happens. let's be adults and sort them out ourselves rather than hoping some (imperfect) higher power can do it for us.
• ashwinaj 9y ago
  I reluctantly agree with you. Employees are smart, especially the ones that harass others and they need to be exposed.
• aaron695 9y ago
  Given that your are advocating for lying to your employees to invade their privacy, I'm not surprised you had issues with interns given what you think is a good work culture. A workplace that has respect for employees would have turned on 'Compliance Exports' on Slack to begin with. Employees would have understood DM were full searchable. To advocate for (what seems to be, Slack is currently a bit vague) a retrospective retraction of privacy that was told to employees is pretty awful. You are also advocating for the ability to browse employees DM's. You could at anytime reset their Slack passwords and read a individuals DM's (but it would also have made you accountiable)
• swat535 9y ago
  You are exactly why we should all be extremely careful with what we communicate on the work network. By "you" I don't mean you personally of course, what I mean is IT in general. You might be ethical enough to not abuse your new found privilege but who is to say that the next guy won't? I believe all employees should restrain from posting personal and private things on a company network or any related device for that matter. You never know how this data can be misused.
• rocho 9y ago
  This is ridiculous. If one is harassed in private they have all the evidence they need to expose the harassment to whomever they want. So now they are not private messages and shouldn't be called as such.